“He’s filled out some. He was so gangly when he left home.”
“Most boys fill out when they hit twenty.”
If George hadn’t been there, she would have fallen. She realized he bore the full brunt of her weight. Clasped together, they stared down at the body.
The same familiar nose, so like his father’s. The fringe of brown bangs, like dusty straw against his forehead. The cowlick beside his right temple, still pronounced although some stranger at the mortuary had attempted to tame it. She whispered, “He just looks like . . . N-Nathan.”
“He was a handsome boy, your son.”
“Yes.”
She had known she mustn’t cry. If she began, she wouldn’t stop. So great was her grief, her soul couldn’t contain it. She’d felt as if she was made of thin, brittle glass, ready to shatter.
Oh, my baby! My baby.
No matter how big he’d grown, her arms ached to hold him.
Just once more, Lord. Please, God, that’s all I’ve ever prayed for. To hold him once more.
Now, with the service ended, she laid her hand against his wooden coffin, her fingers longing even for the remembrance of the ripple-smooth grain of the wood. Oh, that she might have been tracing Nathan’s warm, living brow instead.
I loved you so much, son. I loved you.
Anyone she’d ever loved had left her.
When she’d given Jo Nell a music list, she’d chosen only one song for Nathan, one she remembered him humming while he’d still been in overalls, before he’d ever even known the words.
“What a fellowship. What a joy divine . . .”
When he’d been little, she had hummed the notes every time she’d gotten in the car and driven somewhere. She’d once been pumping gas with the car door open when she’d heard him humming from the car seat in the back; he was only a toddler, holding his own beside her and almost getting the tune.
“Ling-ling ling-ling.”
“Lee-eaning, lee-eaning, leaning on the everlasting arms.”
Nathan, fat little legs dangling high above her face as she held him, the two of them laughing and nuzzling noses. “Sing me the ‘Ling-Ling’ song, Mama,” he’d asked her in his little baby voice, giggling.
Bea laid her three wilted roses among the latticework of carnations already covering the casket.
I’ve leaned on your arms for a long time, Father. Why is it that this time, when it mattered most, your arms let Nathan go?
Chapter Three
Dozens of small details remained to be resolved in Nathan’s death. Blessed details, because they shielded Bea—kept her mind from the dreadful stirrings of anger and loss and sorrow she knew waited for her whenever she searched her own soul.
Several of her aunts had driven in from Potter, and although they had booked a double room at the Gander Inn Motel, they needed to be looked after.
The morning after the funeral Bea drove them through the state historical park. All the while they chatted and tried gently to distract her over the Soddy homes and the early Nebraska homesteads, Bea thought, How can any of this be real? How can I be here and Nathan not be coming home?
Her employer at Nebraska Public Power District insisted that she take a leave of absence to sort out her af fairs. Once the aunts had left, she kept herself busy by washing and sorting mountains of Pyrex casserole dishes. She spread out her pretty floral stationery, took pen in hand, and set about acknowledging the condolence cards that she’d fingered and sorted and reread and the memorial fund donations made in Nathan’s name to the Antelope Valley Sunday School Fund. All the while she worked, she wanted to declaim, I don’t thank you, God. I don’t thank you for letting this happen to us.
She met with the president of Nebraska State Bank and pored over funeral bills and tax papers. Nathan’s death certificate waited for her signature atop a mountain of other legal documents.
Before she ordered Nathan’s headstone, Bea struggled to decide how the small granite gravestone should read. “Beloved son,” she had scribbled, her emotions numb, on a crumpled page of the notepad she kept handy by the phone. “Nathan Roger Bartling.”
Every time she stared at the words, she denied herself the opportunity to count what they represented—the gangly boy who ate too fast and turned goose calls into music and broke into a purposeful, retainered smile whenever she’d be bent on scolding him. Such heart break. So many mistakes and so much love. “Beloved son.”
It’s my fault. I’m the one who made the choice that sent him away.
Day-to-day life continued around her. The Prime Timers at the senior center held their weekly luncheon with a special program entitled “How Herbal Remedies Can Change Your Life.” The Monday night golf tournament at the nine-hole Oshkosh Country Club, where participants had to bring their own steaks if they wanted to eat and had to tote in their own iced-down coolers if they intended to imbibe, continued this week as planned. The Ash Hollow Planning Commission spent the entire July meeting debating the future of Pete Staley’s swine operation, which he proposed to bulldoze so he could construct an RV campground and travel park instead.
Just before noon one day, still thinking about the headstone, Bea drove her decade-old Chevrolet Monte Carlo to Ash Hollow Cemetery. She parked on the gravel road and walked out across the grassy knolls, shaded her eyes and gazed toward the bluffs hewn deep into the rock by the slow-moving Platte River.
She’d bought this cemetery plot too quickly last year, in a huff because Geneva had read in the paper where city people from Denver were opting in droves to be buried there, a rural setting beside a river within driving distance that cost only sixty dollars a plot. Even now, just two days after they’d buried Nathan, no evidence remained of the striped yellow tent and the rows of chairs and the little pine pulpit where George Sissel had stood. Only a neatly edged oblong of fresh-turned Nebraska dirt and three easel flower arrangements that had begun to slightly lose their color.
When she’d bought the plot, she hadn’t thought about needing it. She’d only bought it to save against time.
In the low draw beside the river, cottonwoods raised leafy broad limbs like supplicating hands lifting toward the sky. It was all very peaceful and solitary, with only the sough of the wind and birdsong for company. As soon as the headstone arrived, this spot would be marked: “Nathan Roger Bartling. Born May 27, 1978. Died July 8, 2001. Beloved son.”
Beloved son.
Off in the distance, a golf cart topped the narrow brow of hill and jostled toward her. The gardener. He stopped once and rummaged through his equipment and Bea could hear the heavy buzz of a motorized garden trimmer as he lopped off weeds around a little fence. Soon the fellow climbed back in, came bouncing along. “Halloooo.” He gave her a wave.
He wore unfashionable green army pants and a decrepit sweater with holes unraveling in each elbow. He cut the engine, disembarked, and brandished the trimmer again, going after wayward bluestem grass on the stone footpath three plots over. “Nice day,” he said over his shoulder.
Bea didn’t know what to say. She supposed, for some people, it was a nice day. But it wasn’t for her. Not a nice month or a nice year or a nice life. She didn’t answer him exactly. Instead she announced, “This is my son here,” as if she was introducing them, as if Nathan was standing beside her peering over her left arm instead of laying beneath freshly dug earth.
The man propped his power trimmer against a monument, pushed both hands in his pockets, and jangled what sounded like a mixture of keys and lawnmower bolts and pennies. He whistled once and surveyed the blue, sun-drenched sky above them. “Well,” he shrugged, “I’m mighty sorry to hear that.” “I’m not really in the mood to talk.” “The funeral a couple of days back. Must’ve been for you.”
“Yes. I mean no. Not me. My son.” “Funerals are always for the people still living.” She thought about that. “I suppose so.” “Everybody you meet in this place has some story to tell. Folks just up and die, no rhyme or reason to it. It’s always sad, no matter whe
n folks go.” He nodded his head toward the Platte River before he stooped down on all fours and surveyed the buffalo grass from ground level as if to make sure each blade was even. He pulled out a small pair of clippers and snipped one or two places. Then he rocked back on his heels, satisfied. “Still, if you have to be dead, this is a fine place to be.”
She didn’t answer. She stared at the clean-cut edges of Nathan’s grave, wondering if this man had made them. “Sometimes people die too soon,” she said at last. “They die before they get a chance to—” Just those few words threatened to be her undoing. She couldn’t finish.
He filled in for her. “—tell you what they’re thinking?”
She met his eyes, wondering how he could know, if he had heard all the talk around town. “Yes. Something like that.”
“You looking for forgiveness, you won’t find it in a cemetery.” He made a broad gesture toward the butte where Bea could see the chimney tops of her little town. “You find it out there.” The squat skyline of Ash Hollow rose against the vast Nebraska prairie, with its steeple of St. Elizabeth’s and the sign that read “Goose Hunting Capital. Museum. Antiques. Grass Greens Golf Course. Free Swimming.”
Bea surveyed Ash Hollow in the distance, thinking he couldn’t possibly be right. “There isn’t anything out there for me.”
The gardener pulled out a trowel. He began to dig a thistle that had just started to grow between two stepping-stones. “You know, some roses would be pretty growing here. I’m so busy taking care of stones and fences and weeds, never have time to think about a rose. You know how to grow a rose?”
Bea’s chin jerked up in surprise. “Who did you say you were?” She peered at him from beneath narrowed brows. “You been around here long?”
He pitched the thistle into a growing pile of cuttings and debris. “Couple of months is all.” He reached out a wrinkled kidskin garden glove to shake her hand. “Name’s Goodsell. Carrington Goodsell. Folks who know me call me Care.”
“You been listening to talk around town?”
He glanced up at the azure sky, the wisps of cloud, as if he expected some answer. “Nope. Get’s a soul in trouble, listening to talk. That’s why I got me a job out here. These folk—” He pointed to the plots that surrounded him. “—don’t say much.”
He’d overstepped his bounds with her and she thought it best to let him know it. “You ought not be suggesting how to decorate people’s graves. When they bring Nathan’s headstone in, I’ll decide what to do about the flowers.”
“Is that your boy’s name? Nathan?”
“Yes.” She knelt to the earth and took a fistful of it, crushed it tight inside her fingers as if she was trying to hold on to something. She hadn’t yet begun to touch her grief. It terrified her, knowing that the monstrous, detestable thing laid in wait inside her—that it would somehow have to be taken out and looked at, maybe even tomorrow, maybe even today.
All around her she smelled and saw living things. The sweet, poignant fragrance of grass. The orange ladybug that waddled across her knuckle. The bee that hovered over a thistle blossom and then was gone.
Care Goodsell stooped beside her. He scrubbed his sweaty forehead with the top of his gardener’s glove, leaving his bangs sticking straight up in wet prickles. He yanked off his glove and stuck out one grimy thumbnail so the ladybug could continue its journey, crawling from her hand onto his.
“When I make my rounds, I’ll give special attention to this grave, ma’am. I can promise you that.”
A child’s garden verse ran through her head. Lady-bug, ladybug, fly away home. Your house is on fire and your children are gone.
Bea stood and dusted off the dirt against her legs with three decisive slaps. Having this man offer to tend Nathan’s grave gave her no consolation.
“It makes no difference to me, Mr. Goodsell. Suit yourself.”
As the days that passed turned into a week, and a week turned into two weeks, the townsfolk of Ash Hollow did not abandon her. They knew well how to take care of their own.
Tom Hodges, her employer at Nebraska Public Power, stopped by to tell her to take whatever time she needed before coming back to work. The Lisco Presbyterians, the Episcopalians from St. George, the Lutherans from St. Mark’s, the Oshkosh Wesleyans, the Methodists, the bereavement committee from the Garden County Church of Christ, and the Catholics from St. Elizabeth’s all appeared at Bea’s door, stopping by to visit or to bring a copy of The Garden County News with the obituary or a paper sack of fresh tomatoes from Sterbin’s Produce Stand down the road.
All the while her visitors sat with her and did their best to ease her trouble, Bea couldn’t help but feel envious of her neighbors going about their routine evening chores and puttering in their yards. Charlie Law across the street bringing out a bucket and sponge to soap down his car, stopping long enough to pick up a tennis ball and toss it for his dog. Next door, Fiona Kepler
spading dandelions. Someone hammering a deck down the street.
“I know it’s awful.” Geneva, who had stopped in one evening to bring two jars of her best plum jelly, followed Bea’s eyes to Charlie and his dog. “I’ve heard there isn’t anything to do that makes it any better, either. Josephine told me that after her Great-Uncle Orley died. She said you just have to fight your way through.”
Although Bea felt closer to Geneva than so many of the others, she had learned long ago to speak with quiet reserve around her friend. Geneva repeated everything. She was considered the best source of information in the entire county, ranked higher than both The Garden County News and the local radio station.
“Thank you for not lying to me.”
Geneva stood from the sofa and gave Bea a determined hug. “I wish you would let Cory come over and water the roses. It would be one less thing for you to worry about right now.”
“The roses take my mind off things.”
“Everybody hates to see you hurting like this. We’re all looking for things we can do to help.”
“You brought me plum jelly.”
“We all thought Nathan would come home, Bea. All of us. Harry Wickstrom told me that his daughter Susan used to moon around after school and say, ‘Nathan Bartling is the nicest boy in the whole class.’ And Vince Wiley down at Otter Creek Marina told me he accidentally gave Nathan a dollar’s worth of extra change once when he came in to buy a carton of earthworms. He said Nathan got clear to the car before he came back and said, ‘I counted this, Mr. Wiley, and you gave me too much change.’”
“Geneva. Please. I can’t bear hearing any more stories like this.”
“You raised a good son, Bea. I don’t care what anybody else says. I don’t ever want you to doubt that.”
Bea didn’t know where it came from at that precise moment, but she took a small burst of satisfaction in petty anger. “You know what Lillie Curfman said to me this morning? She said it was a good thing Nathan hadn’t come home before he died. She said I should consider it a blessing that I hadn’t had the chance to see him in a long time. As if that should make it easier.”
“Oh, Lillie Curfman wouldn’t know the curved end of a spoon,” Geneva humphed. She slung the handle of her purse over her forearm and draped her cotton-knit sweater, absolutely needless in the warm Nebraska evening, over the crook of her elbow. She reached up for a parting hug. “You call me if you need anything, okay?”
“I promise. I’ll call.”
“I mean it, Bea. Are you going to be okay? I don’t have to leave if you don’t want me to.”
Bea turned on the porch light. “I’ll be fine.” She stood behind the screen and watched Geneva’s retreating figure cross the wedge of artificial light that splayed over the grass.
Seconds later, the car engine revved to life and the vehicle backed down the driveway, stopped, turned, changed gears. Then it was gone, tires crackling against loose gravel along Pattison Drive, leaving an empty memory of a woman’s hand waving in a flicker of glass.
Bea turned away,
determined to make it once more through her go-to-bed rituals without breaking down. Charlie Law had rinsed his car, wiped down his white-wall tires, and gone inside. Fiona had left a little pile of weeds beside her curb, probably to be picked up in the morning. Down the street the hammering had stopped.
The nighttime and all of its emptiness loomed large and impossible before her.
Dark. So much dark. After supper before bedtime proved to be the loneliest time of all. Someone she’d known once had called it the harsh of the night. She didn’t think she could stand nine hours of it again.
Bea opened the refrigerator door and surveyed the dozen or so casseroles stacked there. She was already growing tired of this mourning food. Where were the steaks, the lacy edges of fresh lettuce, the crunchy nuts and carrots? She lifted one corner of foil, then another. Finally she settled on none of the above and selected two eggs instead.
She dug a small skillet out of the cabinet, pleasing herself slightly with the racket she made rattling through her vast assortment of pans. In no time the eggs were bubbling and hissing in the skillet. But as she stared at the yolks and whites in the pan, desolation and longing overcame her, exploding like the splattering eggs from somewhere deep within her chest. Her eyes began to sting; the pan and its contents began to shimmer.
For days Bea had fought to hold back her tears. But she could not hold them back any longer. Sorrow engulfed her.
She laid the spatula aside.
Bea hadn’t any idea where anyone had moved her boxes of Kleenex and she didn’t care. Tears fell into the pan on the stove and sizzled. They ran down her jaw and soaked the collar of her old, frayed shirt. They streamed down her face and plopped from her chin.
I’m not crying because I’m lonely. Salty drops rolled the length of her nose and dangled there, waiting to drip. I’m not.
Beatrice Bartling had been living with loneliness for a long time.
When other people lost someone they loved, they faced the task of cleaning out bureau drawers, going through letters they hadn’t seen, sorting through hair brushes and silly mementos and shoes with lopsided worn soles and underwear.
A Rose by the Door Page 3